Posted
by
CmdrTaco
on Monday April 23, 2007 @07:43AM
from the never-even-seen-one dept.

Alioth writes "Twenty five years ago today, Sinclair Research launched Britain's most popular home computer of the 1980s — the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. Costing about one third of the price of its rivals such as the Commodore 64 while having a faster CPU and a better BASIC interpreter, the machine sold well in many guises throughout the 1980s and had more than a staggering 9,000 software titles. The machine may well have done well in the US too, had Timex — the company building the machine under license in the US — not already been in financial trouble and about to fold. The machine was also extremely successful in Russia, although not for Sinclair Research — because the Russians made dozens of different clones of the machine, and did so right into the mid 1990s. The machine still has a healthy retro scene, including the development of new commercial software by Cronosoft, and new hardware such as the DivIDE, which allows a standard PC hard disc or compact flash card to be connected to the machine."

My dad told me a story about a friend of his that purchased a Sinclair. He was so excited to have a computer. He hooked it up, turned it on, and thought he'd ask it a simple question. "Who was the first president of the United States?""SYNTAX ERROR" What?! My dad explained to him that he had to write a program to tell the computer how to answer that question. "Well if I have to tell it what I already know, what's the point?"!

Yeah, he didn't get it. Actually, I imagine he's a lot more into computers these days. Finally got what he wanted, twenty years later.